Dr. Greer Gerni (she/her) joins the UMKC Conservatory as an Assistant Teaching Professor of Theatre, Fall 2022, teaching courses including Theatre History, Script Analysis, and Beginning Directing. She holds a PhD in Theatre History, Theory, and Literature from Indiana University, an MA in Educational Theatre from NYU, and a post-graduate certificate in Acting, Directing, and Meyerhold’s Biomechanics from the Russian Academy of Theatre Arts (GITIS). Her research interests include Russian theatre, political protest theatre, and theatre for social change. Her dissertation is the culmination of ten years of research on contemporary uses of Anton Chekhov’s texts and Konstanin Stanislavsky’s training methods at the Moscow Art Theatre and beyond, specifically the ways in which their work supports theatre for social change on the twenty-first-century stage.
Dr. Gerni has presented on topics ranging from North Korean musical theatre to portrayal of gender and sexuality in Chekhov’s plays at conferences of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE), American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and others. For nearly a decade she facilitated international training programs for American actors, directors, and designers at the Moscow Art Theatre School through the International Foundation for Theatre Education and Research (IFTER). As a theatre artist, she works mostly in ensemble-based theatre, devised theatre, and verbatim theatre and prefers work that subverts audience expectations of genre.
Welcome Dr. Gerni